The Big East blows away

So he remained the coach at North Carolina State, and the athletic director, and in future years he waved off entreaties from the NBA and from other colleges for one deceptively simple reason.

“Don't mess with happy,” he said.

The Big East Conference, glowering rock star of college basketball for much of three decades, messed with happy.

It kept adding onto its stout little palace. It wound up gerrymandering its way into the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, and now it has crumbled like a foreclosed subdivision.

Its Catholic basketball schools have bolted to try to find the original concept, to recreate the commonality and verve that made John Thompson and Lou Carnesecca as legendary as Mutt and Jeff. Along the way the Big East earned a healthy nationwide hatred. That has been replaced by a weary shrug.

Last week the Big East lost Villanova, St. John's, Seton Hall, Marquette, Georgetown, DePaul and Providence. They will be joined, eventually, by Xavier and Butler, in what is already being called the “Big Priest.”

It is a very marketable plan, without football, and it links colleges with the same goals, even though it lacks the geographic serendipity of the original Big East.

But when Syracuse, Louisville, Notre Dame and Pittsburgh bolted for the ACC, and the Big East went on a desperate scavenger hunt that inexplicably brought in East Carolina, Houston, SMU, Tulane, Memphis, Boise State and San Diego State, the Catholic schools fled the neighborhood.

“Football, one sport, has dictated all this,” Cincinnati basketball coach Mick Cronin said, after a victory at Marshall.

“We're sitting in a state (West Virginia) where the state school is playing 800 miles as their closest road game. If it's all about this much money and money grabbing, the players need to get paid.”

Indeed, West Virginia bolted the Big East for the Big 12. That means it plays conference games against Texas Tech, which is 1,500 miles away.

Meanwhile, Texas plays West Virginia but not Texas A& M. Kansas plays West Virginia but not Missouri. The Kansas-Missouri squabble goes back to Quantrill's Raiders. They had played football 120 times, but not this year.

Every rivalry, USC-UCLA included, hangs by the thread of one phone call.

The Big East, midwifed by Dave Gavitt, was a natural.

Most of the Northeastern schools had very loose conference affiliations in the '70s and '80s. The ACC powerhouses were built on those Yankees, like Art Heyman, Billy Cunningham and John Roche, and UCLA had no trouble luring Lew Alcindor from New York. There's little question that the same Alcindor, in the '80s, would have been mightily tempted to pick Georgetown.

Providence, St. John's, Georgetown, Seton Hall, Connecticut, Syracuse and Boston College were the original members in 1979, with Villanova and Pitt signing up soon afterward.

In 1982 Georgetown was in the NCAA title game. In 1984 it won the championship. In 1985 three Big East teams made the Final Four and Villanova knocked off Georgetown in the finals.

Madison Square Garden, Capital Centre, the Carrier Dome and the Spectrum throbbed with sellouts. The Big East Tournament hunkered down in the Garden and became the premier event in the game.

Big East basketball also had an identifiable style — no stitches, no foul. To everyone else it was the Thug East. To the Big East, everyone else was a bon-bon.

UConn recruited nationwide to win three NCAA titles. Syracuse made the championship game three times and won once. Even tiny Seton Hall came within a botched call of a championship.

But the football-playing schools wanted some of that. The league began stretching itself out of joint when it annexed Miami and Virginia Tech.

The ACC, with more guaranteed money, swiped them back and then picked off Boston College, which has receded into near-invisibility in its own market.

Then came Cincinnati, Rutgers, South Florida and Louisville for all sports and Notre Dame, DePaul and Marquette for everything but football. The tectonic plates kept shifting until they shattered.

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